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A Writing Life
by Brigitta Olubas
The first biography of Shirley Hazzard, the author of The Transit of Venus and a writer of "shocking wisdom" and "intellectual thrill" (The New Yorker).
Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life tells the extraordinary story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard's authorized biographer, has drawn, with great subtlety and understanding, on her fiction (itself largely based on Hazzard's own experience); on an extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks; and on the memories of surviving friends and colleagues to create this resonant portrait of an exceptional woman.
This biography explores the distinctive times of Hazzard's life, from her youth and middle age to her widowhood and years of decline, and traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath Hazzard's formidable, beguiling presence. Olubas shows us the places of Hazzard's life, of which she wrote with characteristic lyricism: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in New York in the 1950s, working at the United Nations and The New Yorker. Olubas also describes Hazzard's long marriage to the writer Francis Steegmuller and their deep involvement in postwar Naples and Capri. Rare photographs from Hazzard's collection and elsewhere accompany the text.
Hazzard was the last of a generation of selftaught writers, devotees of a great literary tradition, and her depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. Brigitta Olubas has brought her brilliantly alive, enhancing and deepening our understanding of the singular woman who created some of the most enduring fiction of the past sixty years.
As Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, "Hazzard's stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: 'We are human beings, not rational ones.'" Here, in Shirley Hazzard, is the story of a remarkable human being.
"An illuminating portrait...In this scrupulously researched biography, Olubas...charts the meandering course of Hazzard's life and travels, drawing on events and impressions that would inform much of her writing...Throughout, Olubas offers a discerning, cleareyed perspective of Hazzard's complex character and a persuasive appraisal of what distinguishes her work. An absorbing, well-crafted profile of a supremely gifted writer." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] rich biography...Olubas does a fine job dealing frankly with those who disliked Hazzard's 'elitism' as well as those who praised her, with a careful touch for capturing the 'implicit misogyny' she was up against. Hazzard emerges as intelligent, complex, and determined—fans of her work should check out this insightful portrait." - Publishers Weekly
"Fans of Hazzard will greatly appreciate this well-researched biography of her life through the places she lived." - Library Journal
"Meticulously crafted...Olubas's biography is more than just a map of the author's movements...It's an account, as she puts it, of 'a writer in the process of making herself,' chronicling how geographic, political, and psychic influences coalesce in a refined deeply insightful perspective...This new account of [Hazzard's] life should confirm her as one of the 20th century's greatest novelists." - Vogue
"Shirley Hazzard's life reads like something out of a Shirley Hazzard novel- precise, unique, lyrical and always riveting. What Brigitta Olubas has done for one of the 20th century's great prose stylists feels akin to what Ellmann did for Joyce, or Nabokov for Gogol. If there is such thing as a perfect literary biography, this is it." - Daniel Torday, author of Boomer1
"About one of her heroines Shirley Hazzard writes: 'To have known her was to understand that the human ideal is not a striving for perfection but for wholeness: she was true, vital, and entirely human, not a paragon but a criterion.' Brigitta Olubas's definitive biography of Hazzard captures in abundance the idealism and ardor of a great cosmopolitan artist, radiant and indispensable, a criterion indeed." - Benjamin Taylor, author of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth
This information about Shirley Hazzard was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brigitta Olubas is a professor of English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She published the first scholarly monograph of Shirley Hazzard's writing and recently edited two volumes of Shirley Hazzard's work: We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays and Collected Stories.
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